How to push your characters to their limits

Most of us at some point in our reading lives have come upon a scene where one of the characters does something so odd it doesn’t just defy expectation, it stops us cold.

We’re not pleasantly intrigued, we’re baffled—or annoyed. The dreamlike illusion we’ve enjoyed up to that point has been ruptured not in some Brechtian breach of the fourth wall, but through plain bad writing. We scratch our heads, thinking: The character just wouldn’t do that.

7 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Indie Published

I wrote a post last week or maybe two weeks ago about what I wish I’d known before my first book deal. This time I’m talking indie publication. Here’s a little background of my indie journey. In 2010, my agent was shopping my fifth book, trying to find my first book deal. In the meantime, it seemed like every writer in the world was making millions on e-publishing. I had a collection of short stories called The Junkie Tales. No big 6 publisher was going to pick that up, so I threw the collection together and e-published it. It sold, maybe 15 books over that first year. Now here’s a list of things I wished I would’ve known before I published that collection (and others since).

From a Nothing to an Author: Author Interview with E.V. Anderson

I’m not big on outlining. I’m with Stephen King in this camp. I start with a general idea, and then see where it takes me, or where the characters take me. Tales of a New Jersey Nothing began as a blog, and I wrote it out of order. One day, I’d write about an incident that happened when I was five. The next day, I’d write about something that happened when I was twenty. Eventually, I put the chapters in order, made sure it all made sense, and voilà, a memoir was born.